Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

I strongly believe that incorporating school events and themes into the music classroom is important, particularly at the primary level.  It is good for the kids, reinforces their learning across the curriculum, builds positive relationships between music teachers and their colleagues and, lets face it, makes everyone look good to the boss.  That being said it is just as important to make sure that we are not subordinating music objectives to other objectives.  After all in every school I have ever worked in or even heard of students get FAR more time studying math, language arts, science and social studies than they do music.

Today, of course, is Earth day, a holiday I feel very strongly about.  I consider myself an environmentalist and try to instill the values of good environmental stewardship in people around me (of all ages!)  Today we did an activity to acknowledge Earth day that is something I usually do anyway, I just tweaked it a tiny bit by briefly allowing the children to tell me what Earth day is about and things we can do to take care of the earth.  I worked them around to how planting a garden is a nice way to care for the earth and then we did the activity “Digging Up a Hole” from one of my VERY favorite books, 101 Rhythm Instrument Activities for Young Children by Abigail Flesch Connors.

This is an activity using shakers in which students sing about and pantomime the various stages of planting a garden starting with “digging up a hole” and ending with “plant is gonna grow”, set to “Dinah Won’t You Blow”.  For the sake of Ms. Connors’s copyright I won’t go into the details of each verse but hopefully you get the idea!  It is one of these wonderful piggyback songs that students pick up very quickly because the words are mostly repeated over and over.  At the end I let each child tell me what he or she grew before putting the shaker away in the bag.

I really think we can satisfy our supervisors by incorporating non-musical objectives without making music secondary in our classroom.  I am very stubborn and feel strongly about children’s need for music education so believe me when I tell you musical objectives are always on the front burner for me.  That doesn’t mean I have to be SO stubborn that I refuse to work other things in along the way!

I am trying not to be a delinquent blogger, although my life got a lot more hectic with the onset of music classes yesterday.  I have completely forgotten since the beginning of last year that pre-schoolers know NOTHING in September.  In the beginning of the year we work a lot on rules, moving around safely, etc.  I like to do some songs they already know so we’ve been singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and the “ABC Song” as well as some material from the first lesson in First Steps in Music: Preschool and Beyond. “Chop Chop Chippity Chop” is always a big hit.  We say the rhyme and make a chopping on the beat motion, then I let the kids take turns suggesting things to put into the “soup”.  We make a big deal about tasting it at the end and I ask them to “show me with their faces” how it tasted.  At the beginning of the year they all just copy me, but within a few lessons they normally adopt a hilarious variety of facial expressions.

Speaking of hilarious and having fun I ran across this short audio clip from last year that put a big smile on my face this morning.  Towards the end of the year we learning the song “Our Gallant Ship” and talked about AB patterns, singing versus speaking, when the students did and did not hear an accompaniment, etc.  Then we busted out the parachute and had a great time playing with it while we sang the song.  This clip does not represent the world’s most amazing preschool singing, but I think it does capture the enormous amount of fun we had doing this lesson and it made my day to have such a strong reminder of how great teaching preschool music is!

Hear my precious students having a ball

One of the things I am very interested in doing this year is introducing some exploratory centers into the music classroom. Its no secret that free-choice time and play are very important in early-childhood learning, so why shouldn’t the music room incorporate these philosophies as well?

I wanted to do this last year, but as it was my first year at a new school the idea got lost in the shuffle. This year I am being given three laptop computers for students to use in my room as part of a 21st Century Learning initiative my district is implementing. The laptops became the impetus for finally getting serious about centers.

My first challenge was space. I do not have a large room and it was not immediately obvious to me how I would define different areas to serve as each center. The solution to this turned out to be simplifying my life and getting rid of everything I could. Notably I got rid of my teacher desk as I have a nice cabinet and bookshelf to keep my stuff in and on and I spend very little time sitting at my desk anyway. This opened up the space previously designated as “mine” to become the technology center.

Now that I had space I had to come up with some ideas. Obviously my first center would be technology, but what to do with the other 15 kids while 3 are on the laptops? After googling and reading many forum threads I found a great idea for a singing center using either a vacuum hose or a curved piece of PVC to create a “phone” for kids to sing into. This carries the sound of their voice directly into their ear which first of all makes them quite excited and second of all assists them in developing an in-tune singing voice. Once I stopped thinking of centers are something elaborate I had to construct and realized how simple they could be the ideas started flowing. My other center ideas so far are:

• Instruments
• Scarves (creative/dramatic play)
• Picture Books
• Listening
• Water play
• Boomwhackers

I owe a great debt to Dr Mark Turner’s website about music centers both for the ideas I came up with and the overall approach to centers.

Of course what I REALLY still want is an iPod center for listening, but I’m still waiting for a grant for that one!